Best laid plans …

All to often if you are chasing creativity, you can get struck in a rut. Today was really wet and overcast most of the day but the sun broke through for a few brief moments so I grabbed my polarizing filter and headed out to try and photograph a rainbow and see if I could enhance the colours using the polarizer (because the rainbow colours are reflected and thus polarized light I was convinced I should be able to darken the sky but brighten the rainbow). Despite dodging sun showers and cold winds I saw no rainbows. One the way back inside I saw my cretaceous garden was beautifully backlit for a just few moments and the revived gingko looked resplendent in its refreshed green.

I think it was Matt Kloskowski that once said if you see good light you must photograph it. Not a wonderful composition or compelling subject but the light was terrific enough to become my photo of the day.

Moral :: Don’t try to plan creativity

Last of Autumn Start of Winter

This was taken with my new android phone during a break in the rain. It was taken using HDR Camera+ and then lightly adjusted to soften the colour a square crop and add the ragged frame using Adobe’s Photoshop Express for Android. Photoshop express was one of the early photo editor apps I used on my previous Android phone so I am roughly familiar with its basic operation. By the way the controls are nothing like other adobe photo editors, At first impressions it has more in the common format of small filter icons to pick the effect you want from a scrollable ribbon underneath the phone giving the impression of a one-click fix. However if you look a bit deeper on the icon on the bottom line there are a number of useful tools for basic edit. The key is the several filters can be used cumulatively on the one image. The first three overlapping circle control cropping tool, which bring up the filters related to colour with a horizontal slider bar to increase of decrease the effect. Next is a small icon with two overlapping l shapes which is the cropping took. Then a simplified icon of two sliders to control exposure, and many tonal and sharpening/noise options. The eye is for red eye reduction and the small frame icon is for adding a frame or fancy edge. Finally there is a band aid to remove blemishes. All in all most of the edit tools you might want to use.

Hail, Rain & No Moon Shine

The Super Moonrise was a non-event last night in Melbourne due to a big storm. There was Hail, Rail and Shine Lightening but the heavy clouds obscured the eastern horizon and the moon
   

Mainly just darkness, clouds & lightening after that and no moon to be seen. C’est la Vie

Can you really refocus in post process?

I came a cross a very interesting little program, when updating what's on my USB darkroom. Its called Smart Deblur, and it promises the restoration of defocussed and blurred photo. Quite a claim! The example is quiet impressive, you can practise with the blur sliders on a deliberately out of focus image of text, which comes op as you start the software.

Ok how does it perform on real photos?. Just after the big storm on thursday last week I found myself in a taxi going over the Bolte bridge just as a double rainbow formed over the city. I grabbed my camera but i was taking the photo through a wet droplets covering the taxi window in rapidly darkening condition. The auto focus was tracking in and out, presumably confused by the contrast on the rain drops on the window. So I turned off the autofocus and had enough time to get two photos before a truck in the next lane blocked the view for long enough for the rainbow to fade, Damn! Trouble was my focus was not quiet right and/or the movement softened the detail too much. So I figured these where perfect images to test the deblur utility! With a fair bit of fiddling and a long wait or two I did get a serviceable improvement, albeit with more noise. which a little tweaking in lightroom calmed down. The results being better than I could achieve in lightroom alone, but in reality don’t expect magic.

PhotoFriday :: Vibrant

Rainbow Lorikeets [Trichoglossus haematodus]

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Vibrant

Late Afternoon Rainbow

The rain clouds cleared a little and for a few moments a rainbow appeared against the dark clouds as the last rays of the sunset lit a few low clouds. Just enough time to grab my polarizing filter to enrich the colours of the rainbow. Then it was gone.

Now you see it, Now you don’t

 
The late afternoon storm, bought dark skys and a few glimpses of sunlight (and rainbows). I took the opportunity to try out my recently "refound" polarizing filter (it is an old filter from film days, and often used back then, but it had been hiding from me for a while). Turn the filter through 90 degrees, took the rainbow from maximum intensity to almost impossible to see.

Fleeting moments & keeping up with HDR

Sometimes there are just fleeting moments in natural light, that can prove hard to capture. It was a drizzly overcast afternoon and I was photographing some dark birds in flight, against the grey sky and choppy ocean, so I had cranked my ISO right up because of the poor light, knowing full well that whilst I might get less blurring of the birds wings I would suffer a lot of digital “noise”. Then the clouds parted and the setting sun lit up the dunes and began to paint a rainbow. I just had time to change my lens move the dial to P (because I leave my program set to take a bracketed set of –1.0EV, –0.5EV, 0 EV, +0.5 EV & +1.0EV), press the shitter & click, click ,click, click, click and then the light faded.I have the Pentax set to save both RAW & JPG format (not really a good idea when trying to photograph birds in flight because in multi-shot mode the extra time to write both the files on the card soon overtakes the memory buffer and slows image capture, but that’s a different story). In this case I ended up with 10 images (5 bracketed RAW and 5 Bracketed .JPG) and a perfect test to look at tweaking the RAW file in Lightroom 4.1 versus some recent software improvements in HDR processing.

I have been routinely using HDR for some time now, whilst my early efforts may have emphasized the surreal, I suspect a lot of folk don’t even realize I am using it anymore. (as judged by the lack of negative comments on places like flickr,  HDR images on the web always seem to always draw out a few particularly bitter comments). One reason is I tend to mainly use Picturenaut 3.2 (it work on my portable application USB and thus I always have it on hand) and its defaults are in general natural looking.. Further it does a good job adjusting hand held images and taking it through to Photoreceptor (aka Reinhard) tone mapping is pretty automatic and the software makes good setting selection to get realistic images (as opposed to luridly coloured surreal effects of some other popular tone mapping approaches).
I find just having my camera set to take a 5 bracket set, and even shooting them handheld is a good strategy when lighting is tricky. Usually one of the set will  be obviously better/best. Then later using picturenaut I can be pretty confident I will get a useful HDR image out as well,. So I have become quiet a fan of using HDR techniques in contrasty or low light, because that’s when I am most likely to take the bracketed set anyway.
I also read some time ago that picturenaut could not process RAW files directly, so I decide to download Picturenaut 3.2 and at the same time Luminance HDR (which I had also seen good reviews on). Well they both performed well, but I must admit I still favour picturenaut it is fast and easy, Luminance was pretty slow on aligning the images but did a good job and it has a lot more tone mapping options. I could easily change my mind once I had time to play more fully with the tone mapping options.
I think this image does capture the golden glow of the fleeting sunset and the rainbow, as closely as I remembered. Unfortunately it also enhance the digital noise, inevitable in the high ISO shot in low light and I needed to use Noiseware to filter this out the speckled texture of this noise and in the process lost some detail. However most Importantly I was able to keep the delicacy of the light.

Lightroom 4.1 does not have the ability to do the HDRi combining of the bracketed images (as far as I know there are also not any plug-ins, like HDRsoft for Photoshop, either) So I just went ahead and selected what I felt was the best RAW image in the set (the +0.5EV) exposure and did my usual tweaking of the hightlight and white tone sliders, but nothing in the shadows in this case, plus a small “touch” to the right on clarity and a reasonable amount of noise correction, followed by a crop, only a few seconds work, once I have the image I wanted in the develop module. To display this in this blog I did export this Lightroom RAW edit to a .jpeg but otherwise this is not further processed.

fleeting light

Photographing a rainbow is difficult enough, but the light wasn't great and I wanted to try out a HDRi set and get a piece of driftwood in the foreground. Ok it didn't quite work because I can not get good registration on the images, because i was moving and it was hald held. Still the rainbow was spectacular.